


Cut Ties With All the Lies (That You’ve Been Living In)

by NataliaWhite92



Category: Supergirl (TV 2015)
Genre: Angst and Hurt/Comfort, Angst with a Hopeful Ending, F/F, Gothic Fantastical, no powers au
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-23
Updated: 2019-06-23
Packaged: 2020-05-16 21:09:03
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 9,168
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19326148
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/NataliaWhite92/pseuds/NataliaWhite92
Summary: “Once she had been like everyone else. She had a mother, a father, a little dog. She had a house and a lawn and a life. And then she hadn’t.”OrDeath AU





	Cut Ties With All the Lies (That You’ve Been Living In)

**Author's Note:**

> Hello everyone,  
> This is different than a lot of stuff I’ve written. But I like it. Hope you do too.

People claimed that 18 was a magical age when one reached maturity, became an adult, figured the world around them out. This had not been true in her case. She would always judge time in a less linear way than her contemporaries. It wasn’t that she didn’t acknowledge the changes that one went through when that pivotal moment came around; the added sense of responsibility that came with being able to make decisions previously denied. But to her many times had been more important than that day. 

The day meant to acknowledge her birth was like many others in a sense. She woke up, she went to school, she sat in classes and listened to teachers who were just filling the time until graduation. Most of their students in the senior class had checked out as soon as those letters stamped with logos of their chosen schools came in the mail, herself included. She had her pick of the litter as it were, getting accepted to not only her fall back schools but every other she had applied to in moments of optimism.

It shouldn’t have come as a surprise, and really it didn’t when her grades had never fallen below the ideal As, AP numbers lining up in a neat row of 5s. Her extracurriculars would be the envy of anyone who had bothered to take a look at them, though no one ever did. She was a prime candidate, a gold star in the midst of the hastily applied sheen on those less qualified. 

She was a perfect student, an example to all those who strived to meet expectations. And it meant nothing to her. For what was perfection when you had no one to share it with?

She was alone in the world. By the time she celebrated, in the loosest terms of the word, her 18th birthday she had bounced around from seven different foster homes, long ago gave up on the idea of a forever family and instead waiting until she was able to set off on her own. The grades, the effort, the accomplishments were done to ensure that she did truly have her pick of what she wanted to do next but as more letters continued to come she was surrounded by the possibilities with no clear path. 

She had always been looking toward the future, waiting for tomorrow and the day after that but now having reached that day she didn’t know what she wanted to do. She could go to college, the addendums promised free tuition and living expenses in an effort to court her. But when she looked into the haze of next she couldn’t picture herself in a dorm room, in lecture halls, in the continuity of studying. The choices were laid at her feet and she couldn’t make a single one. 

She finished class, having not spoken a word. It was a game she had been playing for many years now, seeing if she could get through a day without vocalizing unless absolutely necessary. She was a fish in a sea of other brighter, more colorful, and if not for her ability to propel herself up stream she wondered if she would even be noticed. Would her teachers look for her if she suddenly had a string of absences on her record or would they just see more As and not question it? Would the students she sat next to in the back corner of the classroom wonder about her empty seat or would they be too wrapped up in their own lives to even notice? She wasn’t sure she wanted answers really, but the questions remained. 

She didn’t have friends, never really had since she was a young child before the marks of fire licked her skin and she started hiding behind baggy black clothes and silence. Before. It was a mark of time that cleaved her life in half. Before the fire. Before becoming an orphan. Before moving from one school to the next. 

Once she had been like everyone else. She had a mother, a father, a little dog. She had a house and a lawn and a life. And then she hadn’t.  
__________________________________________

One fateful night had changed her life forever. A seemingly random event, nothing but a loose wire that sent sparks flying. By the time she had woken up the house was ablaze. Her father had rushed into her room, door thrown open and voice leaving her body at the wave of fire behind his larger than life figure. He had always been so big to her, invincible. The weeks she spent in the hospital had seemed a joke when they had to keep telling her he turned out not to be. He had saved her though, as close to saving as he was able to before succumbing to the smoke and fire licking at their heels. A hundred yards from the doorway they had made it when he collapsed, falling on top of her and trapping her. She felt the last breaths leaving his body before he stilled, her little body too weak to move out from under him even if she had wanted to. She hadn’t. She hadn’t wanted to leave him, but when the man in the firefighting gear had come and carried her scorched body out the front door she had been forced to. 

She had looked back at her house, screaming at the man to take her back, to save her family. She had seen the shadow of her father in the doorway and couldn’t understand why they were leaving him behind. He was standing there, watching her, not moving toward safety and they left him. It wasn’t until much later that she realized it hadn’t been her father standing there but D.  
__________________________________________

She spent weeks in the burn unit of the hospital, naked but for the gown that felt weighted on her bare skin, nerves screaming as they tried to regrow after each debridement. Lucky to be alive they told her, the only survivor. Her mother had died in her sleep, smoke inhalation taking her before she even knew what was happening. Her father though, he had almost made it, and irrational or not she blamed herself from that day forward. If he hadn’t tried to save her he would be alive, having to carry her small body had slowed him down until he came to the precipice of safety only to watch it be torn away. She screamed herself hoarse in that bed until her throat was as raw as the rest of her body. 

She hadn’t had any visitors in the hospital, no family to claim her. Her mother and father had both been only children to older parents who had passed before she was even born. Her parents had friends, people she had grown up with, who now looked at her as nothing but a reminder of their loss, as if it could compare to her own. 

She had a lot of time to think while she was in there. It was her first experience with not being seen as a person anymore. She’s a list of needs that are attended to by whoever is on shift. It’s not that some people didn’t try, because some did but there’s always other people who needed help, who were responsive, who smiled. She lost that ability when she lost her parents. 

The only time she remembered her voice was when D came by. And he did often while she was in the hospital. 

She had known him her whole life or for as long as she could remember. He always came to her in times of great pain or loss. She never knew his name and wondered if he had one. She called him D and knew she had a reason but as she grew older it eluded her. He was an adult from her earliest memories. But he never changed, he never aged, he never grew.

He was a shoulder to cry on. Before the loss of her parents it had been insignificant issues: playground squabbles, getting grounded, the bunny who had to move to a farm when it got old which she knew meant it had died but she wanted to allow her parents the innocence of thinking of her in that way. He didn’t appear the same each time, and she could never really remember what he looked like as soon as he had gone but she knew him the moment he was near. 

Her mother had told her about soulmates and she wondered if this was what he was. She didn’t think so. It was hard for her, even at a young age, to reconcile the idea that the world had a perfect match for her. And if so that person wouldn’t be fully grown when she was but a child.

Her father told her stories of his imaginary friend that no one else could see but she knew D was real. He wasn’t with her all the time. She couldn’t call for him. He didn’t play games with her. He was there sometimes and not most. 

I help people, he said. The sick, the old, the tired, the lost. I help them when they have no one left. 

She wondered, while she lay broken and burned in the hospital bed, if that applied to her now. Was she lost? She knew where she was in the literal sense but she was very much alone. She had no one, though there were people always surrounding her. She was tired but she fought sleep until the medicine was forced into her veins and she was met with the unconsciousness only possible through drugs. She hated it. 

That moment. That tiny second when she woke up before she moved and felt the pull of her new skin that sent screaming pain. That second when she wasn’t in a hospital bed but instead tucked in the quilt her grandmother finished just in time for her to be born. She had never been without it. Until now. That second when her mom was about to knock on her door and she would pretend to be asleep until her mother grabbed her toes through the quilt and shook them as she laughed. That second when things were still in the before. 

She thought D to be a superhero.  
_______________________________________

He continued to visit her as she grew. As she got welcomed into new foster homes with less enthusiasm as the number continued to climb. As she started new schools and felt the weight of the stares on her patched skin and scars. As she grew older and learned that nothing would ever be the same again. 

He talked with her but rarely answered her questions. Not that she asked much though sometimes her curiosity got the better of her. 

One day she asked why he kept coming back. 

“I have never watched a child grow up before for I am never in the same place much,” he told her. “But with you I have had the chance.” 

“Am I one of the lost?” 

“No child. You are not. One of mine at least. The ones that I help are the ones with nothing left.” 

“But I have nothing.” 

“That is not true. You may not have what you had but you have spirit. You have a future. You have possibilities.” 

“Doesn’t everyone?” 

He didn’t answer her. She looked at him and even while staring straight at him she couldn’t make out the features of his face like she would anyone else. 

She wondered about it, really she did. But she accepted it as part of him like he accepted her. She can’t judge their relationship by any other standards. The memory of her family and the time before become fuzzy even as she tried to remember the exact color of her mom’s eyes. The scratchy texture of her dad’s beard when he kissed her face. The feel of being safe when in the arms of her parents. 

She also doesn’t know how to compare his lack of features when it seems like nothing anymore is concrete. She meet so many people all the time that they seem to blend together. She knew that she can make an effort, get to know somebody. But she can’t. She has D. He is all she needs. 

“You’re different,” he told her and she knew it to be true. 

“Why must you leave me all the time?” she asked. 

“Because other people need me now. I have a job to do.” 

A superhero.  
__________________________________________

She wondered if she would see him before she had to choose what she was doing next. She wouldn’t ask him his opinion. He wasn’t her friend in that way. But she could talk to him when no one else would listen. 

She had no way of knowing when he would come. She used to try to keep track of the times he appeared. But it was like they happened outside of time and space. She would go to track, to write it down, only to find the exact day lost to her. 

He didn’t end up showing. She walked across the stage and received her diploma. She nodded her thanks to her most recent foster parents and left with her belongings stowed in her car. 

She spent the summer making her way from one coast to another, working odd jobs in exchange for places to stay and watching people. She had always had a fascination with people. The distance born of loss and scars allowed her to observe without actually being a part of their lives but always wondering. The man with the bowler hat and old fashioned mustache who always looked like he was late in New Orleans. The woman with the heartbreakingly beautiful face sitting in the cafe more often than not with a book she never turned the pages of in Nashville. The small children running through the busy streets of Atlanta in a mob, looked on fondly by the grandmothers on their porches drinking sweet tea. The female couple in Hartford, laugh lines carved deep into their faces and casual intimacy born of decades together. She watched them all, writing their stories in her mind before moving on. 

She knew not about attachments but found herself remembering people as if they had been part of her life instead of just in passing. She thought of D, of their relationship, and always considered forging something more with people she felt the flame of connection with but never did. She wasn’t meant to. She may not know exactly where her place in the world was but she was cognizant enough to realize it wasn’t making small talk with people she may never see again. She just isn’t that kind of person. She doesn’t need other people. She has herself. And she has D.  
________________________________________

Scar tissue covers 76 percent of her body but she sometimes wonders about the last 23. The parts of her that are not regrown. The parts where she still is her authentic self. When so much of her is misaligned, stretched to fit, not right, can the small pieces of untouched normality even really be taken into account? Did the fire affect her brain as well? She tries to remember before. She tries to unlock the chest where she tucked away all of the pieces when her life was so decisively cut in two. She knows that if she can just find the right key she would understand. She would be able to compare herself then to now and see if this was part of her before, the part that doesn’t need other people. 

It’s not fair. She knows this too. She was so young when she lost her family, so new to the world, so not ready. Would it even really tell her anything to compare the innocence of a child to the jaded mind of an adult only in technicality? One who might have lost more than her parents in the fire.

She takes stock as she sits in her car at the grand entrance way to the prestigious college most people could only dream of attending. Here she is, fresh from her summer of exploring this country she has always called home. An idea so absurd to her she would laugh if she could remember how. So much lost. So much maybe to be found. She needs to reassess her lists of tomorrow, her goals, the shiny new pieces she would add to her collection. But should it be different now? 

She is an adult. She is in college. She will grow these next few years than ever before, according to something she had heard once. Some platitude in a guidance office where they tell you things like you’re safe, this is a safe space. That word. That word was so wrong for her or most of the people who entered that office in the first place. How can someone sit there and pretend like they have any idea how to create a safe space when there is no such thing? 

Her goals. Her plan. She’s always had a plan. She needs one now. Maybe it’s finally time to try with people. She wonders if she can make it through the rest of her life with no one by her side. No one to turn to when she needs to talk, though this she can’t imagine. No one to hold her when she’s upset, not that she would ever show someone when she was. No one to tell her it was okay, but why would she even believe them if they did? 

She’s still wondering what she should do next when the car down the row from her honks its horn; the sound surprising her so much she jolts forward, pressing the gas instead of the brake, and slams into the car in front of her. Her head whips forward at the sudden halt and she takes a moment to feel her brain bounce into place. She’s being facetious, she hopes, waiting for her breaths to calm down and the owner of the car to exit. 

The woman does, and Lena forgets to be scared. She forgets to be worried about what the woman is about to say to her. She forgets to be worried that she has no way to pay for the repairs that she obviously caused to this car. She forgets anything except for the woman’s face which, for some reason she cannot begin to understand, is pulled into a smile. She’s waving. She’s waving at her and she needs to get out of the car now. 

She looks around before she opens her door but no one seems to be paying them any attention at all. They are going about their business like Lena’s car, held together with duct tape and all the hope that hadn’t evaporated long ago, didn’t just put a sizeable dent into the car not only decades older than her own but also in perfect condition. Except for the dent, and the part of her bumper that is still kissing the sleek baby blue body. Lena may not know much about cars but she knows vintage. This is even older than that. She remembers how to be worried. 

“Hi,” the strange blonde woman says, hesitating a few feet from her as if she can sense her anxiety. And maybe she can. It’s not like Lena has had any sort of interaction with another person where something was expected from her for longer than she cares to think about. She has spent so long in her own world that it was an accepted tenant that the other world would leave her be if she didn’t do anything to disturb it. Like run her car into someone else’s. She still hasn’t said anything. The woman is starting to look concerned. 

“I’m sorry.” She can hear the roughness in her voice, the scratch of disuse, the croaking that doesn’t sound like the voice she remembers. But memories tend to fade quickly for her. She knows enough to hear the tone is off, too flat, not enough emotion, none at all actually. 

“Oh, please no it was probably my fault. I was in my own head. Do you ever get like that sometimes? Space out and forget the world really exists?” The stranger is still smiling at her. She has taken a step forward like she wants to enter Lena’s personal space. Lena realizes her bubble is about five times the size of other peoples. When you grow up in foster houses that are so full most of the caregivers forget to even designate you a bed much less a room to yourself you learn to view space as a luxury when you finally find some. 

Lena looks at her, really looks at this woman for a second who looks to be about her age. She is taller, by several inches and not because she is wearing heels but because she is akin to a basketball player. Maybe she is a basketball player; she has the arms for it. Arms housed in a shirt that looks athletic though Lena’s always been behind in the style and it might be something someone wears to look athletic but is actually fashionable. She’s wearing shorts, which leads credence to the idea that she’s an actual athlete. But they are cloth shorts, that look to be hand stitched instead of mass produced. Is that a thing? It must be. 

The woman’s face though, it’s perfect. Even though it obviously isn’t. There’s no such thing. But it is because Lena can pick it apart. She can see where the nose is a little too big, the top lip a little too thin, a tiny scar above her left eyebrow. Small imperfections that when you stop looking for them fall away and leave behind the loveliness of her face. Lena can see all these things when usually she can’t ever get the details. She wasn’t sure if it was like musculature that when unused atrophies but she did know it wasn’t normal for her to be able to look at someone’s face and see it clearly. 

She still hasn’t said anything but the woman seems willing to wait. She’s watching her the same way that Lena is but hers is less picking apart the facial structure out of marvel, it’s more… she doesn’t have the word for it. Is that concern in her gaze? Is that what concern looks like? It’s the word that comes to mind but how would she know if it was the right one? 

“I do,” Lena continues when the woman looks at her like she might want her to, “know what you mean. About the world, getting lost. But it wasn’t you who hit you. That wouldn’t be possible, at least not with the same car unless it wrapped around a pole and then maybe it would touch the front bumper to the side. It was me who hit you because someone honked and I was not expecting it.” She finished and watches for the woman’s reaction. This woman couldn’t possibly know that Lena had just used four times the words aloud than she had said in the past year to anyone but D. She could have no idea that Lena’s heart was racing and her palms were sweating and she didn’t understand her body’s reaction for the first time in as long as she could remember. She probably heard Lena’s frankness and would be confused, maybe curious, maybe cruel. 

“Well no harm done,” she says. Still smiling. She’s not looking at the car and Lena wonders if she has yet to see the harm. 

“I dented your car.” 

“Nothing worth loving isn’t worth work. I can have that dent beaten out in a jiffy.” 

Lena really wonders about brain damage, hers or this woman’s she’s not sure.

“You talk strange,” Lena says and she realizes as it leaves her mouth that it’s not a very nice thing to say. She’s out of practice, but people don’t make allowances in their assumptions. They are quick to jump on the faults of others. 

The woman instead laughs. She laughs like she really finds this whole situation funny and holds her stomach. She laughs with her other hand under her throat and Lena wonders how many people are staring at them. She finally stops laughing and takes an exaggerated breath before standing back up, slapping her thighs before she straightens. 

The woman looks at her, mirth still in her blue eyes. They are so blue Lena wants to ask her to turn toward the sun so she can see them better. They hold worlds in their depths far too developed for a woman who is still as much a girl as her. A hand comes toward her and she holds her ground only at the last minute when it stops and waits in midair. She wants to shake my hand, her mind tells her. She doesn’t know what to do so she brings her own hand up to touch this relative stranger. 

She hasn’t touched another person in many years. Many years that may lead all the way back to the split of before and after. But she feels the skin of this woman’s hand touch hers and doesn’t look at her worldy eyes now. She doesn’t want to see the confusion when the stranger feels the skin that isn’t really skin like hers. She doesn’t want to see the pity or the worry or anything else so she allows her hand to be grasped and shaken once, then twice and pulls back in a way that feels too slow but also too fast. She tucks her hand back in the sleeves of her coat. Her clothes are all too long in the limbs for just this reason. 

When she does look back at the woman she realizes she missed her saying something. Lena wonders if she could just turn and get back in her car and drive away. Try again at the next school. Instead she feels her eyebrow raise, the pull at the pinched skin in the corner of the right side of her face still twinges but it’s a pain she has gotten used to more so than the ones on her body. 

“Sorry, did I mutter? I said my name is Kara. Kara Danvers.” 

“Hello Kara Danvers.” 

The woman chuckles again and Lena finds now that she can still see her face unlike everyone else she has met and she likes it. It’s a soft sort of face. It looks very natural for it to be smiling at her, like this happens most of the time. Like the muscles in the woman’s, no Kara’s, face are used to this setting and fall back into it. 

“I would say hello to you but I don’t know your name…” 

“I am Lena.” Her voice has loosened up a little. It still feels rusty, but it sounds less harsh. 

“Hello Lena.” Her name is soft in Kara’s mouth, like her face, like her voice, like her. 

It’s not the last time she runs into Kara. Kara turns out to be unlike the people she had always liked to watch. Kara kept coming back, and Lena wasn’t sure whether she was glad or not anymore.  
__________________________________________

Lena was unaccustomed to noticing the people surrounding her day to day. The ones she honed in on when people watching were at her own leisure and special. She didn’t know what made them special, just something about them reached out to her. They were whispers in the wind though, appreciated while they were there but ephemeral. 

Kara though. Kara was bright and detailed and everywhere it seemed. She was in the lecture halls that Lena snuck into, sitting in the back and taking notes sometimes but mostly just listening to the droning of the professors. She had never much needed to write down her thoughts or copies of lectures, her mind seemed to hold ideas and facts with almost no effort. And in a time where assignments were no longer handed in she had skated by these past many years with minimal interactions if any at all. It suited her fine. 

She imagined, when thinking about herself, that people took her in and quickly forgot about her. Part of the scenery of the classroom, no matter what the size. She is sure she gave off some sort of aura that disinclined people to approach her. This too suited her fine. 

But Kara, she ignored it all. She somehow managed to be in all Lena’s classes, sometimes sitting directly next to her and sometimes not. It wasn’t too much of a surprise because she assumed, by the look of Kara, their ages to be similar. So to find her in each of her freshman general studies classes was not too much of an oddity. But it was. It was because Kara talked to her. Kara remembered her day in and out. Kara, who used outdated phrases like cat’s pajamas and bee’s knees. Kara who made the muscles in Lena’s face form into a smile she had thought herself unable to form. 

“Why don’t you ever take notes?” Kara asks her one day as they were waiting for the rest of the students to file out of the hall. 

“I’ve never needed to,” Lena says, wondering at the movement in her stomach. Was it uncomfortableness? Was she hungry? She hadn’t eaten this morning, and thinks she did sometime last night but she can’t really remember. “Why don’t you?” 

Kara blushes, she is prone to this reaction Lena has noticed. She’s quick to get flustered and blush at most things Lena says. Lena doesn’t know what it means. 

“I probably won’t be here long,” Kara says on the dulcet tones of an admitted secret. 

Lena has never before wanted to ask why as much as she has when she’s with Kara. Why is the beginning of so many nagging questions that she has about Kara. But she knows if she does it will open the door for Kara’s reciprocation and that she’s not ready for. So she allows her her cryptic answers to questions and her tendency to tail after Lena. Lena doesn’t mind it much. It’s new but not in an unpleasant way.  
___________________________________________

They continue as they have been and time blends into itself. Lena going to classes and Kara being there. Kara patient and waiting for something Lena knows naught. Until one day. 

One day that is not like the rest. One day when things change again. One day when Lena has to inevitably create another marker. 

“Lena we need to talk,” Kara says at the end of their last class. 

Lena has never found Kara to be so affrontive in their interactions and she finds herself intrigued. 

“Please do,” she says carefully. Wondering what could possibly be bothering this person who has become a part of her life somehow. 

“This is going to be difficult to hear and I’m sorry I have to but he thought it should be me to tell you.” 

“Who?” Though Lena thinks she knows. There’s only one person she could be talking about and now Lena’s scared. What would D want to tell her that he couldn’t himself? Lena realizes she hasn’t seen him for many months now and that is strange. She thinks. Usually he visits her more...she thinks. But not since Kara. 

“You know who Lena. I know you know. He sent me to you because it’s almost time.” 

“Time for what?” Lena stops walking, Kara already halted next to her and looking at her with what Lena thinks is concern in her eyes. There’s moisture there too and Lena is afraid for her to open her mouth. 

“Lena, you can’t stay here anymore. It’s almost time to leave. To join us if you want to. He thinks you might. He’s been with you for so long and says you are special...like me.” 

“Kara, please. Just tell me.” 

“Lena I don’t belong here. Neither do you. I haven’t lived in this world since 1947. I was hit by a car and died. He came then and asked if I wanted to help people as he does.” 

“I don’t understand,” Lena says, she whispers, she pleads, because she does understand. She has known for a while now but was always sure she was wrong somehow. 

“You died 9 years ago Lena. You died in the hospital after the fire.” 

Lena hears the words and then nothing.  
__________________________________________

She wakes up in a hospital bed and sits up quickly looking around. Kara is sitting with her on the bed. D is standing watching her. 

“Why am I in a hospital?” She asks looking around. It looks like the same one she was brought to when she was a child but that can’t be. It’s across the country, far behind her. And she’s dead. Dead people don’t come to hospitals, at least not this part. 

“You’re not. Your brain manufactured this place. It’s different for everyone. We are in the in-between now,” D says and she can finally see him for who he is. Death. There’s no sickle and no hooded cloak. He is not made of skeletal bones but instead a man. Average and normal as anyone else but also different. He is old, Lena knows this to be true though he does not look it. He is somehow no one and everyone at the same time. Lena looks on his true face and knows she has seen him many times before, even when she was not looking for him. She remembers. She remembers everything for the first time. 

It’s like a pressure that had been mounting finally blew and she is pulled down into memories. She sees her house catch fire, the spark growing until it consumes everything. She sees her mother take her last breath, peaceful and without knowing what was happening around her. She sees her father, oh how she had missed him, the fog in her mind not doing him justice she realizes as he burst through the wall of flames looking to engulf her door. She sees him pick her younger self up, already straining for each breath himself but determination branded into his eyes as he makes each step look Herculean. She watches him fall and she reaches toward him, her arm she realizes nothing but a wisp as she observes but can not change the outcome. 

She walks toward her body underneath her father’s, a tiny thing barely visible beneath his bulk. Even though she knows she can’t be hurt she cringes away from the fire that encircles the three of them, instinctual as the burns on her grown body start tingling as if the cellular memory too is activated. She sees herself peek out from below the chest of her father, who even now is huddled atop her trying to protect her from the inevitable, the flames creeping ever closer. She cries, she hasn’t cried for her losses ever but now, watching her father fight so valiantly against the force he can not control she cries. Great wracking sobs that she feels convulse through her body. She watches him die and sees in younger self the realization, the acceptance. 

The next part speeds up, the memories sharper in her mind as the fireman comes in and carries her outside. Her screams filling her ears until she can no longer take it and is pulled out of the memory.

She comes back to the room with Death and Kara and sees the tears falling down Kara’s own face, silently contorted in such raw pain she knows she was with her in her memory. Somehow seeing everything she did as well. Death is stoic but he too was with her. 

“But I lived,” she cries. The truth reaffirmed just moments ago. 

“You did,” Death confirms before going silent once again, looking toward Kara as if it was agreed that she should be the one to continue. 

“You lived two weeks in the hospital Lena before your body gave out. They tried so hard to save you but the damage to your heart and lungs was too severe. You died on March 31st 2010 at 752am.” 

Cold numbers. Concrete unarguable specifics. She can not fight facts. She can not pretend anymore. She knows Kara’s words to be true. This time when she slips away to nothing it’s with the question in her head of how the dead can even sleep. Of how she can feel Kara tuck her into her chest and feel the warmth of Kara’s body cradle her own. 

She wakes again and Death has gone. It’s just Kara and her now laying on the bed but now they are somewhere else, a room she recognizes as her own from a house that was reduced to ashes a decade ago. Kara is asleep and Lena watches her, rising enough to stare at her face. She notices things she had not before, looking beyond the image of Kara she holds in her mind. 

She sees the scars on her face that run deeper than the small one above her eyebrow. The pits of and mars of the road that claimed her in the accident. She sees the pebbling on her exposed arms and chest under the vest Kara has donned. The twist of her leg beneath the pant legs stretched out on the bed. She doesn’t know why she couldn’t before but accepts them as Kara’s true form. 

She looks down at her own body and stops, the scars she has been avoiding looking at for years are gone. She pulls away from Kara, sitting up and pulling off the sweatshirt she always wears with the long sleeves and baggy middle. Her arms, that had been a patchwork of scarred and new skin, stretched and shiny where it had taken after the fire, was blemish free. It was white skin, the most noticeable thing about it now was how little sun it had seen. 

“We see ourselves how we want to once we acknowledge we have died,” Kara says softly. Lena feels Kara’s eyes on her as she reaches the shaking fingers of her right hand toward her newly exposed left arm. She runs her fingers gently along the skin, pressing down harder to watch the capillaries fill when she draws away, the little color she has returning after the pressure has ceased. 

“But your face?” Lena asks, eyes returning to the scars. 

“I don’t wear them most of the time, but I wanted you to see me.” 

“Why? Why Kara? Why do you want me to see you? Why are you here with me? Why did you come find me and let me think things were okay when you knew the whole time?” Her voice is steadily rising higher than it had in years. “How am I this old? How did I age when I died 9 years ago?” 

“You were in a type of stasis Lena. When people die, especially when they die young, and they aren’t ready to go yet, they become who they should have been if it hadn’t happened.” 

She’s so calm. So precise, like she knew the questions Lena was going to ask before she did. And maybe that was true. If this was Kara’s job she could have been in this exact position a hundred times before, a thousand, but this was Lena’s only life. Her only death. She wants Kara to be upset with her. Something she never would have imagined saying after the same pane of existence for so long. She never was affected by things like this. Never got angry, or happy, or scared, or anything. And now she knows why. 

“But I lived!” She yells, wanting Kara to meet her on this level but knowing she won’t. 

“You didn’t Lena. You existed but you were stuck. Not in this world or the next.” 

“The next?” 

“I don’t know what’s next. I… I wasn’t ready either when it happened to me.” Kara breaks eye contact for the first time since Lena woke up and Lena feels guilt. She’s still getting used to these deep feelings when she has been in a state of numbness so long. 

Everything feels new and too much. Too strong, too bright, too loud. But she pushes past it, surprised to see her own hand reaching away from her arm and toward Kara. Comfort, she’s offering comfort. Her hand lands on Kara’s forearm and she watches Kara peek up at her from where her head had lulled down. Her eyes are so blue, so deep and light and filled with more than Lena’s newly awoken brain can identify. 

“What happened to you?” She can recognize that she is being blunt at this point. It may not come natural to her to weigh her words against how they will be received but she is nothing if not adaptable. She looks at Kara, wondering if she will even answer her, and she wouldn’t fault her if she didn’t. 

“Can I tell you my story? It doesn’t have a happy ending because it hasn’t ended yet. I always thought that’s how stories went, beginning, middle, and the happy ending but that’s not life. And that’s certainly not death.” She’s looking at Lena, giving her the option and the Lena of even yesterday wouldn’t have chosen to accept this gift, because that’s what it is. Getting to hear someone’s story is a gift, something to be treasured and not thrown away. She nods and Kara begins. 

“I was born in 1929, the world was a very different place back then. It was slower, and people knew their neighbors. I know it sounds naive but it was safer. People didn’t know what they should be fearing because they didn’t know yet what others were capable of. We had our problems, our strife, but we also had community that has been lost along the way. 

My family was normal as any other. I had a mother who stayed home and raised me, she went to college but her whole life she had wanted to be a mother. She was smart though, so smart and my father loved her fiercely. She always had projects going, helping my father in his practice. He was an engineer and my mother kept him on his toes. She was the one who he talked things out over the dinner table with every evening. She showed him how to look at things from a perspective he would never have attempted. 

My father loved family more than anything else. He was never part of the misogyny that was rampant. He protested with my mother. He helped her create a world where their daughter could grow up proud to be anything she wanted to. They changed the world for me and taught me that helping people was the highest calling. That love was the reason for existing, no matter what it meant. 

They died before I could ever test their love but I like to think they would have accepted me. Gender was never as stringently monitored or adhered to even back then in our home. When I wanted to spend more time building things than dressing up they loved me. I think they would have loved Rachel. 

Rachel was… She was everything I knew about love, but she wasn’t raised as I was. We loved each other like I always imagined soul mates would. But nothing is perfect, not even love. 

She became engaged the week I was supposed to start my apprenticeship with our town’s carpenter. I wanted to build like my father but I wanted to do it in a more personal way. I wanted to know the people I was making houses for instead of redesigning the structure of buildings to aid hundreds. I wanted that connection that they taught me was so important, I wanted to make them proud. 

The morning I left Rachel’s house I was devastated. She had just told me that we couldn’t keep meeting in secret. That it wasn’t fair to her husband to be. That even though she would never love him as she loved me she had to do what was right. She kissed me goodbye and I broke. I wasn’t paying attention when I stepped into the street and the car hit me before I even heard the man yelling to move. 

I was furious when I woke up. I knew exactly what had happened, though watching the accident occur confirmed it. The way my body was dragged under the car made me sick, the pain the man felt at having killed me. I prayed for him later, but at the time I was angry. I was so angry at how unfair it was, everything in my life had lead to nothing. I cursed the heavens and refused to move on. I wasn’t ready, I hadn’t had a chance to live. 

Death came to me and offered me another option. He told me that I could still help people, that I could make my parents proud. I didn’t know how he knew about the inner workings of my mind but I knew his words to be true anyways. I told him I would help him and he told me I had to say goodbye to the life that had ended and embrace what was in front of me.” 

Lena watched the play of emotions the whole time Kara had been talking, visceral reactions to the memories decades gone. She watched Kara get angry all over again. She watched her love for this woman, who was probably long dead, pass over her eyes and she had hurt in that moment. She had hurt for Kara but also for herself, she didn’t know what to do with that pain. That irrational pain that didn’t make any sense for who was Kara to her but someone representing the lies that had existed for half her life?

But her anger took over, eclipsing the other emotions warring inside her. Anger was easier, anger was within reach and grabbable. She could take it in her hands like modeling clay and twist it to her around until it was the shape perfect to take up the space of the things she didn’t want to consider right now. 

“This is what you do? You go to people and pretend to be a part of their life? You come to me and walk me to class, let me believe something that’s not real? That’s cruel.” 

She stays strong. She stays angry but she breaks as the last words leave her mouth. She breaks. She feels the actual break in her voice, in her being. She’s not this person. She’s not someone who feels and emotes and loses control. She’s dead. She died and now she knows and she’s feeling things and it’s not fair. Irrationality fills her being and she hates it. 

“It is real Lena.” 

“How many people have you done this to? How many people have you helped?”

“One.”

“Why?” She’s shocked. She can’t help it and she stops trying. It’s impossible to be angry at Kara. She is the essence of sincerity, the personification of genuine. She asks because she needs to know. 

“Death told me I wasn’t ready until now. He came to me and told me it was time, that I was needed.” 

“What made you ready?” Her voice is hushed, her breath bated, she knows this is what she’s been waiting for and she’s impatiently petrified, heart in her mouth. 

“You. It was you Lena.” Sincerity, genuine, the simple truth, the irrefutable candor. 

“I need time.”

“Of course.” There’s hurt in Kara’s eyes. Her tone subdued. “Do you want me to leave?” She asks as someone who isn’t ready to hear the answer and their roles are reversed. 

“No.” She laces her fingers with Kara’s hand and holds onto that one piece of stability in the eye of a chaotic storm. “But I think I need to remember everything.”

“I’m here.” And Lena knows. 

Lena remembers the hospital. The smell of antiseptic mixing with her burned flesh, raw and still on fire though it had been thoroughly put out. Her nerves are screaming, though she has finally stopped. People try to talk to her, tell her it’s okay as if anything ever again can be. They don’t know, they will never know. She is alone. She remembers the noise of the machines, the constant of the beeping yelling at her that she is still alive. She wants them to stop. 

Nurses come and offer her water, she stares ahead. They tell her she’s a miracle, she stares ahead and counts her blinks. Everything hurts. Everything is gone. 

She remembers dying. The gasp of breath that inflate her lungs one final time. There is no pain now. People rush around trying to save her and she stares ahead, wondering if she should tell them they didn’t fail. They aren’t failing when she has already greeted and made friends with Death. He’s there, watching and waiting for her. He doesn’t say anything but she knows he’s sorry. Can Death apologize when it’s his duty to be the last thing people see before their eyes close one final time? She doesn’t know but as the machines finally quiet, as the pain finally ebbs, it’s finally done. 

Her next memories are but flashes lined up in a queue as if they have been waiting for her for so long. To finally show her the truth. The people she has watched over the years, the ones she felt the connection with. She now knows they are like her, ghosts in a world that has continued on without them. She doesn’t know why they stayed, didn’t know what they were at the time but she now understands that sometimes people aren’t ready. For she was not herself. 

She sees the foster homes with eyes wiped clean of mirages she placed over them. They were abandoned places, long shut down and empty of the living. The school she attended was closed and filled with memories that she assimilated to. She is awed and terrified at the power of her delusions, left now with the reality that they never had been real. And neither had she. 

She comes back to herself, to the bed, to Kara who is watching her apprehensively waiting for her reaction. She wishes she knew what to feel but the numbness that had been her constant companion has abandoned her, leaving her with too much to sort through.

“What happens now?” 

“That’s your choice Lena. You can’t stay here anymore, it’s not your world. But you don’t have to move on if you don’t want to, you can help us.” 

“Become someone like you? Help people who have died?” 

“Yes. I don’t know how it works, you’re the first person I’ve met but he knows.” 

Even as a child, Lena lived in a world of absolutes, of seeing where she placed her feet and what was in front of her. That hadn’t changed when she died she realizes and knows she can’t move on. Can’t go somewhere that she does not understand. She can’t. 

“How long do I have to decide?” 

“I don’t know,” Kara tells her. She sees her strain against touching her. Lena would welcome the touch she thinks but can’t force herself to make the first move. She looks at Kara, sees this path laid out before her as the known. The reality in this new world she has found herself in. She’s made her choice. 

It’s so easy once she decides. She reaches forward and places her lips on Kara’s, the breath she wasn’t aware she was holding releases over the fluttering surprise of Kara’s lips. 

Kara gasps and stills for a moment, just long enough for Lena to wonder if she should pull back and apologize. But then Kara comes to life beneath her lips and returns her kiss with vigor. Her mouth parts against Lena’s and she washes Lena’s teeth with air escaping. She knows now the feelings when Kara was telling her story were some sort of green-eyed monster, the personification of jealousy. 

Kara’s fingers thread through her hair and Lena gives herself willingly to the pull. Kara’s lips whispering the siren’s song she is helpless but to follow, finding the source in the warmth of Kara’s mouth, opening to Lena’s completely as they find solace in each other. She knows now why Kara had to wait. The certainty of this moment undeniable. She wonders as tongues meet and hands grasp for purchase if there really is some kind of grand plan she was not aware of. The circumstances of them meeting never to arise but in death. 

Kara follows her lips as she pulls back, tasting the smile that Kara forms back for one last kiss. It’s then that she notices they aren’t alone. Her eyes catching Death’s as he watches them, face showing no expression but Lena knows as she knows Kara is hers that he too is smiling with them. 

When she brings her eyes back to Kara’s face she is met with a dazed expression and she surprises them all when a laugh croaks out of her throat, stilted from disuse but genuine in a way that she never would have expected. Happiness, she realizes, this is what happiness feels like. 

“You have decided,” Death says. Not a question for he knows the answer. 

“I want to help. I want to stay,” Lena says back, watching Kara blink against the moments before and look behind her to acknowledge Death. 

“But I don’t want to be alone anymore.” 

“What? Alone?” Kara’s voice raises in surprise and her face takes on a protective mask as she reaches for Lena’s hand, body straightening and moving between Lena and Death who watches the events play out before him. 

“You will not be alone. Neither of you have to be if that’s your decision,” Death says. 

“It is,” Lena says, squeezing Kara’s hand to reassure her that they will be making the next steps together. She doesn’t know if Kara realizes yet that this is how it was supposed to happen. That they were the soulmates Lena’s mother told her about in her first life. 

“Then let us begin.” 

Death moves toward the door, light escaping in the cracks where wood meets frame and waits for them to join him. 

Kara turns back to Lena. Her expression is calm, matching Lena’s own. She can feel the beat of Kara’s heart in her palm. Lena pushes her grandmother’s quilt off their snaked together legs and stands, never releasing Kara’s hand.

**Author's Note:**

> Lemme know what you thought. You can find me on tumblr at nataliawhite92 if you wanna come yell. 
> 
> Special thanks to xxpaperflowersxx for her help! Go check her stuff out guys if you haven’t already!


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